Surrealism and Marie-Thérese

Surrealism and Marie-Thérese

Surrealism and Marie-Thérese

Surrealism and Marie-Thérese

Surrealism and Marie-Thérese

Certain of Picasso's new friends–besides Cocteau, there
was also the Spanish painter Joan Miró and the French writers Louis
Aragon and André Breton–began to form a new artistic group, called
the Surrealists. They scorned rationality and technology and all
the other values of the parental generation that led to the horror
of world war, placing their faith instead in the alternate reality
of chance, desire, coincidence, and dreams; the goal was to create
art as "beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table,
of a sewing machine and an umbrella." The word surrealism itself
was coined in 1917 by Apollinaire to describe Parade, but
it was not until a couple years later that the Surrealists became
an organized avant-garde.

Picasso did not join the Surrealists; instead, they joined
him. Breton, who acted as a sort of ringleader and chief manifesto-writer
for the Surrealists, called Picasso "one of ours" in the fourth
issue of Révolution surréaliste, in 1925; in the
same year, Picasso showed some of his Cubist work at the first
Surrealist group show.

Picasso never fully embraced the most characteristic technique
of Surrealism– "psychic automatism in its pure state," as the first
Surrealist manifesto put it, or letting the pencil or paintbrush
wander over the paper without exerting conscious control, as in
a hallucination, so that the image forms itself. But he was influenced
by the interest that the Surrealists took in the unconscious as
the mind's "dark side," filled with deep fears, inexpressible longings,
and the most basic drives. While in his Analytical Cubist period
Picasso had thought of the painting as a rigorous visual dissection
of its subject, he now turned to a conception of painting as an
expression of his unconscious, like a dream. While "The Dance,"
for instance, relied on a Cubist concept of space, there is nothing
analytical about it; it is violently, explosively expressive. The
dislocation of the joints of the frenzied bodies recalls Breton's
statement that "beauty will be convulsive or not at all."

The rage of these paintings–sanctioned by the Surrealist
idea of art as the dredged-up material of the unconscious, the
spew of violence and eroticism that one can't express in polite
society–has been linked to Picasso's frustration in his marriage
to Olga. She was becoming tiresome, snobby, querulous; the two
lived on separate floors of their home. Picasso's women always
appear in Picasso's work, and are always represented with the utmost
honesty; thus Picasso's art is also an incredibly detailed sexual
autobiography. This autobiography extends through Picasso's surrealist
works as well: rather than appearing as mere repeated graphic motifs,
as Eva had in his Analytical Cubism phase, the women now emerged
as bodies inflected, formed, and distorted by Picasso's feelings
about them. During this period, Olga becomes, for Picasso, a horrid
siren with a devouring maw.

Around the same period, in the late twenties, Picasso
turned back to sculpture for the first time in nearly a decade.
His motif, again, was the guitar, and his technique assemblage.
But this time around, his choice of materials was more hostile;
nails protruded aggressively from the surface and he even considered
cementing razor blades into the frame of one of his works, so that
any incautious touch would draw blood. But his sculpture was still
conducted on a small scale, assembled like a collage; only later,
with the help of the sculptor and metalworker Julio González, in
what would become his most fruitful artistic collaboration since
his work with Braque, was Picasso able to realize larger-scale,
metal sculptures.

Meanwhile, turning away from his wife, Picasso found a
new love, a girl named Marie-Thérese Walter. As she recounted
later, "When I met Picasso, I was seventeen. I was an innocent
child. I knew nothing–about life, about Picasso. Nothing. I had
been shopping in the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me coming
out of the metro. He just took me by the arm and said: 'I am Picasso!
You and I are going to do great things together.'" The two fell
very much in love and her presence permeated his art throughout
the duration of their liaison. As one of Picasso's friends said,
"At no other moment in his life was his painting so undulating,
all sinuous curves, rolling arms, and swirling hair." Two portraits
of Marie-Thérese as she dozes, both filled with bright, pure colors,
smooth lines, and an atmosphere of serene sensuality more typical
of Matisse than of Picasso, typify his work under her museship.

More Help

I thought I was good at writing essays all through freshman and sophomore year of high school but then in my junior year I got this awful teacher (I doubt you’re reading this, but screw you Mr. Murphy) He made us write research papers or literature analysis essays that were like 15 pages long. It was ridiculous. Anyway, I found